Weaving Ties participated in the third Amazon summit organized by COICA in October 2016. This summit actually had different activities:
The training workshop for COICA’s communicators took place from Tuesday 26 to October 27, with the intervention of PURPOSE training them in the use of social networks (especially Twitter) as tools of advocacy. Weaving Ties participated in the workshop, in particular by financing the participation of young AMPB communicators in the workshop. Here, PURPOSE presented a proposal of unifying all the campaigns by country, with the hashtag #GuardianesDelBosque. They practiced with the development of graphic material visualizing a solidarity with the struggle of Standing Rock, North Dakota (against a pipeline that passes in Sioux territories).
There was also a COICA Congress, where delegates from the COICA’s grassroots organizations from the 9 countries of the Amazon Basin participated . At this summit the Weaving Ties team was actively supporting the translation of the French-speaking delegation from French Guyana.
A conversation was prepared and organized by the young leaders of AMPB and COICA on the situation in their territories, in the form of a television panel, which was transmitted live by streaming. This activity has obvious effects of training these young leaders in political representation in front of the media.
This «Amazon Summit» had some achievements:
The young communicators of COICA and some of AMPB not only acquired new skills in the use of social networks, but also met and united, thus creating links between them and their organizations. As José from PURPOSE was his coach in this workshop, he helped consolidate his leadership in this matter. He had the initiative to link the workshop with the action #NODAPL (Standing Rock), in order to help increase the notoriety of organizations.
It seems that a «global team» of strategic communication begins to consolidate, with the participation of people from PURPOSE, communicators of AMPB and COICA, and Weaving ties. This team has been collaborating on a campaign focused on the «voice of the drums», to convey the idea that some organizations of people of the forest are meeting in Marrakech to be heard. This campaign was sponsored by the participants in the COICA meeting, who signed the drum. For this reason, Weaving Ties supported the Summit decision to send two delegates to North Dakota, in Operation Standing Rock .
As the Weaving Ties team (Leticia Doormann and Michel Laforge) collaborated with COICA at its summit, helping with translation tasks, we have achieved some degree of confidence on the part of some representatives of COICA and we are almost «part of the team«.